State Robotics Competition a Huge Success
By Brenda Blevins McCorkle / The Daily News
The robot's movements aren't smooth, and its design isn't as close to a humanoid as the ones in the movies.
All that aside, the boxy mechanized creation is a pretty good effort for the group of R.A. Long and Mark Morris high school students, their adult mentors and six weeks of grueling night and weekend work.
The young people and their robot competed in the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Saturday and Sunday in Seattle at the Qwest Field Event Center. The competition was hosted by the nonprofit organization called FIRST — For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.
FIRST is a 22-year-old non-profit created to foster science and technology and funded by a slew of corporate sponsors.
The Cowlitz team took part in the contest through the WSU Extension 4-H program. Longview school board member Jennifer Leach, who works with the Extension's 4-H Youth Development program, approached Mark Morris shop teacher Bob Koenig about the project.
"We're one of eight counties in Washington doing this, and Washington is one of five states with a partnership with FIRST," Leach said. Koenig gathered 17 students to help build the robot and found 13 volunteer adult mentors to guide them through the process. The crew met from 6 to 10 p.m. three weekdays and nearly all day on Saturdays for six weeks, which was the amount of time they were allotted for their mechanical creation. "I asked them (the adults) at the first part of January if they could give me six weeks of their lives," Koenig said. "They've been phenomenal." Passing on funds from J.C. Penney, the state 4-H program gave each of the county teams $6,500 for the competition entrance fee and robot parts, and $3,500 for additional materials, for a total investment in Washington of $80,000. |
 Members of the Grays Harbor County Robotics team with their robot. The group received the award for the highest ranked Rookie Team at the competition in Seattle March 19th. |
WSU's 4-H "unrolled the program and said, ‘Here's what the game is, here's what we want you to do and here's three big boxes of parts,'" Koenig said.
The robot's design was left entirely to each individual team, but the end product had to be able to complete a set of tasks during the game.
Calling the unit Lucy, the team recorded the testing they did on the robot, which stands at almost 5 feet tall and weighs 120 pounds. The video showed the creation, powered with a 12-volt battery, moving jerkily across the floor, its bare metallic limbs moving like the arms of a child learning to walk.
"This piece here is a grabber," Koenig said, pointing to the video screen. "The grabber has ahold of one of the tubes, and it takes it over and puts it on one of the pegs."
A scissor lift the students constructed from aluminum was designed to help the robot reach the highest pegs.
A human hand operated the joystick that controlled the unit. The team could have chosen to program the robot to do its work autonomously, but "we didn't have the time to get into it," Koenig said.
Because of the deadline, the students had to "bag and tag" their robot - place it in a wooden box they created for safe hauling - and couldn't make further changes. But on a recent Saturday, there was still plenty of work for the kids and their mentors to do.
Edward Oswalt, a 15-year-old Mark Morris student, worked on a wooden scissor lift for the robot with Chris Job, a Kelso High graduate who recently graduated from college with a degree in mechanical engineering.
The wooden scissor lift, Job explained, might have to take the place of the metal one during the contest.
"They've made one out of aluminum, but it's heavy, so we're making a substitution in case the motor in the screw drive doesn't work," Job explained. "This one will be much lighter than the previous one."
Edward was in on the production of the aluminum scissor lift, which he said "took a bunch of welding."
"That was really cool, especially the arc welding," he said.
Because of his experience with the 4-H project, Edward said he wants to take a robotics class next year.
Some of the students also worked in a "mini-bot," programmed to be deployed near the end of the game. It had to climb up a pole and touch a plate there to earn the team extra points.
Mark Morris students Austin Ashcraft, 17, and Nathan Leslie, 16, worked to get a sensor attached to the top of the mini-bot that would connect with the plate. It would also help stop the small robot and send it back down the pole.
"If it doesn't come down, then after a time, a grabber will come out and just knock it off the pole ... and that's not good for the robot," Nathan said in the days before the contest. "You want it to come down on its own."
On the other side of the work room, mentor RaeLynn Kuljis, a 2010 MM grad, worked with mentor David Boyd, an electrician, millwright and pipe welder, and Scott Firth, math and science teacher at Monticello Middle School.
The mini-bot kit had come with wheels, but the team decided to purchase "omini wheels," that would allow the tiny robot to roll effortlessly in all directions.
"The easier it is to turn, the less battery we use and the longer we can run in the competition," said Boyd.
Boyd said he enjoys sharing what he knows with the young people.
"It's all for the kids, the knowledge of the old-timers, passing the torches," he said. "We need to get kids interested young so that they get the brains kickstarted, get the thinking outside the box."
Firth hopes to bring the program to his students.
"They also have a middle school competition, so it will be nice to see how it works," he said.
Leach said she sees the 4-H program, which people usually see as "beef, sheep and swine," benefitting from exploring the new territory.
The robot had to be weighed, so she called the group in charge of the farm animal sale at the Cowlitz County Fair to see if the Cowlitz team could bring the unit to the fairgrounds for a weigh-in. Because the market scales are electronic, the committee brought them to the school and were able to see the robot.
"What's fun to me was seeing the traditional and new combine," Leach said.
It's similar to 16-year-old Mark Morris student Bruce Kirkpatrick's experience. He was in the mechanical group and helped mill machine parts for the robot. He found himself learning to use hand tools, a novelty since his school schedule has no room for a shop class.
"I don't have a lot of access to thise kinds of life skills," Kirkpatrick said.
Working with such a large group and sticking to precise schematics was also educational, he said - as was getting to operate the robot a few times.
"It was nice to try it out and see that all the pieces I made worked," he said. "It didn't fall apart, so we must have done something right."
Posted March 2011
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